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Comment by triceratops | Hacker News Reader

I read the article but I'm more mystified than when I read the headline. To recap:

A man is killed in a road-rage incident.

The killer gets the maximum sentence for manslaughter (10.5 years).

The appeals court says the judge was influenced by an AI-generated video of the victim and sends the case back for re-sentencing. Fine, ok.

Where it gets weird: The video was made by the victim's sister. In the video, the victim says he believes in forgiveness. However, the family demanded the maximum sentence for the killer.

This strikes me as strange. If they wanted the maximum sentence why did they submit a video about forgiveness? Did I miss something?

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This whole thing is bizarre.

I don't fully understand the details of the case, but if someone were to kill a family member of mine in a fit of road rage, I would be furious if the sentence was a paltry 10.5 years.

Victims or victims' families pleading for leniency always puzzled me. Where is your iron?

Grief is not simply a function of one’s iron.

Not so much perplexing if they considered the AI rendition an accurate representation. It's somewhat quite internally consistent in its own illogical way

You mean: the family members personally wanted the maximum sentence, but they wanted the (dead) victim to be able to express that the victim wants leniency?

Yes exactly that - I parsed it as such.

It doesn’t confuse me at all. But maybe that’s just because I come from a family where people disagree as sport

It doesn’t confuse me at all. But maybe that’s just because I come from a family where people disagree and try to undermine each other as sport

Even if it's accurate it seems counter-productive to the objective, which is to get the maximum possible sentence.

FWIW for normal slights, I believe in forgiveness too. Deadly violence over a road-rage incident isn't one of them.

In any case this whole thing is a tragedy.

> This strikes me as strange. If they wanted the maximum sentence why did they submit a video about forgiveness? Did I miss something?

Just normal emotional manipulation.

Present the victim as an angel who was so perfect that they forgave the perpetrator => the perpetrator is an irredeemable villain for harming the angel => maximum penalty

> Present the victim as an angel who was so perfect that they forgave the perpetrator

But why would the judge buy it? Everyone knew it was AI-generated and not the victim's actual words.

I can't help but smell powerplay here that the killer paid + forced the sister to make that video to help him with the case. It doesn't make any other sense otherwise.

Where I am from, in many famous killing cases where murderers are powerful, they pay off victims families, families announce forgiveness and the culprits go free.

The sister may not agree with her family?

Or the AI brother didn't agree with his family, including his sister.

It's absurd, but I have no doubt there are plenty of people who would ask an AI to represent a deceased loved one for them and treat that output as accurate. So they asked AI to represent their dead family member and it (being AI) had a forgiving and humane take that likely wasn't accurate and was more a representation of the baked personality of the AI.

The family, presumably, disagreed with their "loved one's" position, but respected their "loved one's" wishes, at least to the point of presenting it lol

Again, it's easy to assume the sister would just engineer a video of her brother saying whatever she would want him to say, but people are dumb enough to believe AI could accurately represent him. If you thought that was the case, then of course you'd present his position as-is. It's the only moral thing to do lol

People are obsessed with granting forgiveness. Some people want to purposefully be victims just so they can forgive someone. Forgiving gives the illusion of control and a moral superiority that some people really crave. It is performative forgiveness. Conveniently, it is difficult to question someone's genuine intentions about forgiveness, and some people have discovered you can also not be the actual victim and still forgive someone for a crime against that victim.

In reality, there should be no forgiveness, only punishments doled out according to the severity of the crime, nothing more. Justice without passion.

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